It is well understood that microbiological pathogens on the hands transferred to other body parts such as the mouth, nose and eyes are the primary cause of infectious disease in humans.
More importantly, in hospital settings, pathogens are moved from person to person and to/from inanimate objects (such as door knobs) to persons. In a hospital or similar environment, caregivers' hands are agents for transferring pathogens from and to patients, the caregivers themselves, and inanimate objects. The hands of heath care workers can carry disease-causing organisms from one patient to another. Accordingly, hand antisepsis before and after each patient contact is crucial to the prevention and control of nosocomial infection.
That improved hand hygiene can be achieved by using various hand sanitizing fluids is beyond question, the problems preventing this known technique from achieving a high degree of use (compliance) are equally understood as being time required and convenience of use. These same twin factors are true in the vastly greater pool of the general population, with the addition of a third very important factor—easy availability to achieve timely use, in a word, timeliness.
Antiseptic gels allow users to disinfect their hands without the use of running water. This convenience has allowed for their increasing popularity. In environments where frequent disinfection is desired—for instance in hospitals and other medical facilities, in food preparation areas, in animal handling situations, and other environments where humans are at risk of infectious contamination—this increased level of convenience affords the opportunity to allow for increased use and thus a reduced level of infection risk.
In order to achieve the frequency of use that infectious environments demand, it is important that users adopt the sequence of actions as a habitual second nature. A doctor or other care provider walking from patient to patient in a hospital, for instance, should automatically affect disinfection without even giving the matter a thought.
Accordingly, there is a need for a convenient, ergonomic wearable dispensing device that is designed for speed and ease of repeated use. Such device would promote the formation of a solid habit, a high degree of utilization, minimization of time taken for the disinfection action, and minimization of discomfort caused by a repeated action.